1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, in general, to a microwave oven and method of controlling the same, which performs cooking by setting cooking times depending on weights of foods to be cooked.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, a microwave oven, which performs cooking by setting cooking times depending on weights of foods, uses a method of directly receiving weight information of the foods from a user, and a method of measuring the weights of the foods using a weight sensor. The former method is inconvenient in that the user has to measure the weight of the food and input the measured weight of the food.
In the latter method, a weight sensor is arranged below a cooking tray installed in a cooking cavity to measure the weight of the food on the cooking tray, and a cooking time is calculated depending on the measured weight of the food. If the user wants to know only the weight of the food rather than cooking the food by using the microwave oven, for example, the user has to open a door of the microwave oven, place the food into a cooking cavity of the microwave oven, measure the weight of the food, remove the food from the cooking cavity of the microwave oven, and close the door in order to know the weight of the food.
With the inconveniences above taken into consideration, there has been proposed a method of mounting a weight sensor on a top of a body of a microwave oven, and measuring the weight of the food outside the cooking cavity.
However, the above method is inconvenient in that when the weight of the food is measured outside the cooking cavity, and the user puts the food into the cooking cavity the user has to input the weight of food so as to perform cooking after memorizing the weight of the food. Therefore, it is required to store the measured weight of the food and perform cooking depending on a cooking time that corresponds to the stored weight of the food.
Further, in the above method, while a container filled with food is put on a cooking tray, the weight of the food is measured. Therefore, even if the weight of the same food is measured, the measured weight of the food varies according to a weight of a container, making it difficult to accurately measure the weight of the food. As a result, the cooking time calculated based on the weight of the food is also inaccurate, deteriorating an overall cooking performance.